Get insight from Mike Van Nieuwkuyk on chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy require­ments.

Q: Evolv­ing platforms—such as PDAs and Tablets, are pro­vid­ing new ways for con­sumer to com­mu­ni­cate, share infor­ma­tion and engage with prod­uct and ser­vice providers. How is the auto­mo­tive indus­try keep­ing pace?

Van­Nieuwkuyk: Since con­sumers spend near­ly 3 hours per day in their vehi­cle, they are seek­ing to make their time in the vehi­cle more use­ful and enjoy­able. We see that new fea­tures that offer con­sumers greater con­nec­tiv­i­ty, real-time infor­ma­tion and flex­i­bil­i­ty to select who or what and how they want to be con­nect­ed are being received with great con­sumer inter­est.

Q: Much of the tech­nol­o­gy is inte­grat­ed into a sin­gle screen on the dash­board. The chal­lenge there is tak­ing tech­nolo­gies from dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers and try­ing to inte­grate them into a sin­gle sys­tem… Are the sup­pli­ers talk­ing to the oth­er sup­pli­ers to help inte­grate their var­i­ous sys­tems? If not, why not?

Van­Nieuwkuyk: In the con­nect­ed car world, there is now an influx of new, non-tra­di­tion­al sup­pli­ers, where the car is just a por­tion or expan­sion of their busi­ness port­fo­lio. These sup­pli­ers are not cap­tive to the auto­mo­tive indus­try, which makes it very dif­fi­cult for OEMs and exist­ing sup­pli­ers to work with them and with­in an indus­try that works at a very dif­fer­ent pace and has dif­fer­ent (some­times com­pet­ing) objec­tives.

Q: Is there such a thing as too much tech­nol­o­gy in a vehi­cle?

Van­Nieuwkuyk: I don’t think the issue is too much tech­nol­o­gy but rather that you can have too com­plex tech­nol­o­gy and you can have unnec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Match­ing the tech­nol­o­gy to the need and the exe­cu­tion to the use envi­ron­ment is crit­i­cal.